


Remus' New Toy

by Charamei



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Ficlet, Marauders' Era, The Quidditch Pitch: School Days
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-09-10
Updated: 2007-09-10
Packaged: 2018-10-26 11:24:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10785798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Charamei/pseuds/Charamei
Summary: Remus keeps getting out of bed to play, so his parents have taken drastic action. Unfortunately, this only makes him feel worse.





	Remus' New Toy

**Author's Note:**

> Note from Annie, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [The Quidditch Pitch](http://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Quidditch_Pitch), which went offline in 2015 when the hosting expired, at a time I was not able to renew it. I contacted Open Doors, hoping to preserve the archive using an old backup, and began importing these works as an Open Doors-approved project in April 2017. Open Doors e-mailed all authors about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact us using the e-mail address on [The Quidditch Pitch collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/thequidditchpitch/profile).

It is one minute past three in the morning, the ninth of March, 1967, and Remus Lupin is very nearly seven years old.  
  
Ordinary children (he calls them real children, in his head), he knows, shouldn't be up at three, but Remus isn't a real child, and his parents have long since resigned themselves to the fact that their son is nocturnal for roughly ten days out of every thirty. There are rules, and Remus is, on the whole, very good about following them.  
  
He's not being so good right now, though.  
  
On the scale of things, it's not a major misdemeanour. He's not trying to cook, or climb on the furniture. He's still in the house (though, after That Night three years ago, they have enough trouble getting him outside in daylight, let alone at night). He hasn't gone into the medicine cabinet or the cleaning cupboard, and he hasn't pinched Dad's wand.  
  
But, when you are under strict instructions to stay in bed and let your back heal, hunching up over your train set is probably not the best idea in the world, and if his parents were awake, they'd have put a stop to it by now.  
  
Remus knows this, and that is why he is being very, very quiet, chuffing under his breath and doing the 'whoo-whoo's in a whisper. His back aches, but he doesn't really care; he's just glad to be out of bed after a _whole day_ , and, in fairness to him, most of the night, too, until he finished _Just William_ for the _hundredth_ time and accidentally stuck the wings onto his Spitfire Air-fix upside-down. His join-the-dots book has been joined with glue from the mangled Air-fix, and his felt-tips went through the pages of his latest colouring book, so it's ruined with great splotches of transferred ink. He's not allowed to put the television on after his parents have gone to bed, so really, the only thing to do was to get up.  
  
The train set is not particularly magnificent - it is bare wood, with only two carriages and he only has enough track for two bends - but Remus loves it. He's built a Lego town, complete with station, around the track, and brought bits of rosemary, stuck in oasis, in from the garden to form trees. There was a lake, briefly, before his mother mopped it up and told him off.  
  
Tonight, everyone is going to the beach, because Dr Legostein has killed Miss Marple (Remus isn't a fan of Agatha Christie) and wants to bury the body. He's already sewn the head onto his Legostein's monster, hidden in the shed at the bottom of his garden.  
  
(Remus' parents worry, sometimes, that perhaps they should encourage him to get out more.)  
  
Everything is going fine until Remus realises that he doesn't have a beach, because he's not allowed water and for some reason sand is off-limits as well. A short trip later, they arrive at the forest of dead rosemary twigs instead, and Dr Legostein buries Miss Marple's headless body under some oasis. It's a perfect crime, and nobody will ever know until Mum decides to tidy up.  
  
Remus is so engrossed in making sure that the body can't be seen from any angle that he completely forgets to be careful, until someone picks him up and puts him back into bed, sighing as they do so.

/\/\/\

It is twenty minutes past six in the evening, the tenth of March, 1967, and Remus Lupin is, finally, seven years old.  
  
He wakes up to find a small pile of presents at the end of his bed, his parents waiting, and that it is still daylight outside, so his mother is technically correct when she wishes him a happy birthday and passes him a plate of toast.  
  
The first few presents are standard: there's a new jumper, books, and a bottle of cod liver oil from Great-Aunt Maureen, who is determined to stop him being so sickly if it's the last thing she achieves on this earth; neither Remus nor his mother has ever had the heart to tell her that she won't succeed.  
  
Finally, there's a large cuboid wrapped in Donald Duck paper, which Remus rips the paper off with interest. Inside is a new railway set, a big one, with a train that works by remote control. Remus' jaw drops.  
  
"Now you've no excuse," Dad says, smiling.  
  
Trembling, he opens the box. There's rail, lots of rail, with corners and everything, and the steam engine, painted bright...  
  
...red.  
  
Remus deflates instantly. The Hogwarts Express is red, he knows, and he knows, too, that he'll probably never see it, let alone board it. In a voice that seems to come from a tiny, scrunched-up ball deep in his throat, he says, "Thanks," but he can't quite take his eyes off the horrible, horrible thing. Instead he just sits there, staring at it, torn between amazement that it's his and hatred for that colour.  
  
There's a long, long silence, then Dad mutters, "Bugger," and Mum shushes him, but Remus barely hears and doesn't care, anyway, because there's a Jarvey in the cabbage patch and he's already got most of its vocabulary listed down with dictionary definitions, and the more he stares at the engine the more he hates it until suddenly, in an eyeblink, it's blue, which is almost worse because he's just proved that he _could_ do it, if only they'd let him onto the real one...  
  
"Oh," his mother says, having long since resigned herself to things like this.  
  
His father coughs awkwardly. "Better?"  
  
"Yes," Remus says, and almost means it. At least he can forget, now, that it was ever red, that red steam engines mean anything to him, and perhaps even that he just changed its colour without paint, and he can go back to pretending to be a real child.  
  
He's not, of course, and he never will be. Dippet will see to that.


End file.
